Effects of Shared Referential Experience Upon Encoder-Decoder Agreement

The effects of referential experience upon encoder-decoder agreement were studied by presenting decoders with stimuli (abstract paintings) originally used to elicit the messages. Agreement was assessed in terms of two measures of word predictability—verbatim replacement and replacement of words of the same grammatical form classes as the deleted items. Results indicated that referential experience enhanced verbatim replacement and more for lexical type words than for members of grammatical function classes. There were no such effects upon grammatical replacement Further, there were no differences according to whether the messages had been encoded as objective descriptions or as subjective interpretations of the stimuli.